A psychologist argues structural changes have eliminated the space for genius.

Einstein, Darwin, Galileo, Mendeleev: the names of the great scientific minds throughout history inspire awe in those of us who love science. However, according to Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at UC Davis, the era of the scientific genius may be over. In a comment paper published in Nature last week, he explains why.

The “scientific genius” Simonton refers to is a particular type of scientist; their contributions “are not just extensions of already-established, domain-specific expertise." Instead, “the scientific genius conceives of a novel expertise.” Simonton uses words like “groundbreaking” and “overthrow” to illustrate the work of these individuals, explaining that they each contributed to science in one of two major ways: either by founding an entirely new field or by revolutionizing an already-existing discipline.

Today, according to Simonton, there just isn’t room to create new disciplines or overthrow the old ones. “It is difficult to imagine that scientists have overlooked some phenomenon worthy of its own discipline,” he writes. Furthermore, most scientific fields aren’t in the type of crisis that would enable paradigm shifts, according to Thomas Kuhn’s classic view of scientific revolutions. Simonton argues that instead of finding big new ideas, scientists currently work on the details in increasingly specialized and precise ways.

And to some extent, this argument is demonstrably correct. Science is becoming more and more specialized. The largest scientific fields are currently being split into smaller sub-disciplines: microbiology, astrophysics, neuroscience, and paleogeography, to name a few. Furthermore, researchers have more tools and the knowledge to hone in on increasingly precise issues and questions than they did a century—or even a decade—ago.

But other aspects of Simonton’s argument are a matter of opinion. To me, separating scientists who “build on what’s already known” from those who “alter the foundations of knowledge” is a false dichotomy. Not only is it possible to do both, but it’s impossible to establish—or even make a novel contribution to—a scientific field without piggybacking on the work of others to some extent. After all, it's really hard to solve the problems that require new solutions if other people haven't done the work to identify them. Plate tectonics, for example, was built on observations that were already widely known.

And scientists aren't done altering the foundations of knowledge, either. In science, as in many other walks of life, we don’t yet know everything we don’t know. Twenty years ago, exoplanets were hypothetical. Dark energy, as far as we knew, didn't exist.

Simonton points out that “cutting-edge work these days tends to emerge from large, well-funded collaborative teams involving many contributors” rather than a single great mind. This is almost certainly true, especially in genomics and physics. However, it's this collaboration and cooperation between scientists, and between fields, that has helped science progress past where we ever thought possible. While Simonton uses “hybrid” fields like astrophysics and biochemistry to illustrate his argument that there is no room for completely new scientific disciplines, I see these fields as having room for growth. Here, diverse sets of ideas and methodologies can mix and lead to innovation.

Simonton is quick to assert that the end of scientific genius doesn’t mean science is at a standstill or that scientists are no longer smart. In fact, he argues the opposite: scientists are probably more intelligent now, since they must master more theoretical work, more complicated methods, and more diverse disciplines. In fact, Simonton himself would like to be wrong; “I hope that my thesis is incorrect. I would hate to think that genius in science has become extinct,” he writes.

I don’t think we've seen the end of the scientific genius; it’s just hard to know where science will take us next. After all, in the first century, a Roman engineer named Julius Frontinus wrote, “inventions reached their limit long ago, and I see no hope for further development.” Look at us now.

Promoted Comments

Someone help me out with this - why does a pseudo-scientist's opinion on science matters one whit?

It's a bit cruel to call a psychologist a pseudo-scientist. Psychology is probably a good demonstration that he's probably wrong. This is a highly descriptive field without strong disprovable predictive theories, similar to biology over 50 years ago.

From the article, I do think this psychologist is falling into a bit of a trap, though. It reminds me of an evolutionary biologists who argued that evolution must have operated differently in the early periods of life on Earth because they generated so many important species—basically arguing that the earliest species were more pluripotent than the later species.

In the period of physics just prior to 1905, it was also said that it was hard to imagine any new discoveries could be made. Electromagnetism had unified electricity and magnetism. Most of physics was thought to just be adding a few more decimal places. There were just a few odd corners to figure out, like black body radiation, the photoelectric effect, and the slight deviation of the orbit of Mercury—very esoteric things that were in all likelihood completely explainable by known principles and not very interesting at all.

Physicists tell each other stories about this time. When a physicists tells you that all that remains is adding a few more decimal places, she's probably smirking.

3 posts | registered Dec 10, 2012

Kate Shaw Yoshida
Kate is a science writer for Ars Technica. She recently earned a dual Ph.D. in Zoology and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior from Michigan State University, studying the social behavior of wild spotted hyenas. Emailkate.shaw@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KateYoshida

149 Reader Comments

Modern drug laws certainly aren't helping. I'm not saying that dropping acid will directly lead you to a huge scientific advancement, but you couldn't have had someone like Richard Feynman under today's drug laws. (Amongst other reasons, he'd have never gotten his security clearance.)

The fundamental foundation of this theory is that the author understands the totality of science and where the knowledge of humanity stands in relation to that. Knowing even a little but about the physical or medical sciences should disabuse anyone of such an utterly ridiculous notion.

I also think that equating genius with the amount of advancement in a particular field is foolish. Not sure why any journal would publish this jibber-jabber.

In this, the average score of people doing IQ tests is slowly progressing upwards over time, which requires the results of the IQ tests to be re-scaled over time. This means that if you were to take someone who gets an average value in today's IQ test and made them do an IQ test from 100 years ago then that same person would fall into the genius range for back then.

I feel that something similar is happening here with science. Take and average scientist today and you'll have a genius scientist 100 years ago.

An invention acts rather like a trigger, because, once it's there, it changes the way things are, and that change stimulates the production of another invention, which in turn, causes change, and so on. Why those inventions happened, between 6,000 years ago and now, where they happened and when they happened, is a fascinating blend of accident, genius, craftsmanship, geography, religion, war, money, ambition...

Above all, at some point, everybody is involved in the business of change, not just the so-called "great men." Given what they knew at the time, and a moderate amount of what's up here [pointing to head], I hope to show you that you or I could have done just what they did, or come close to it, because at no time did an invention come out of thin air into somebody's head, [snaps fingers] like that. You just had to put a number of bits and pieces, that were already there, together in the right way. -- James Burke, Connections, 1979.

I don't know, there are constantly new modern sciences and ground breaking discoveries, so there is room for the occasional genius as well as the team of scientists. What did the Mensa Society have to say about it? We still don't have anything close to real human artificial intelligence or artificial human intelligence, whatever you want to call it, and the energy generation sector, solar or otherwise, may lead to fundamental discoveries. You mentioned exoplanets, but it's been amazing astrophysical discoveries upon amazing discoveries lately, as published on Ars Technica. So who knows, one day a genius might find a completely new application for these theories. Hell, he might find God, or ... be God! Especially if he's called Johnny.

We are still working to digest and engineer all the things that current knowledge is capable of. This is like complaining that there aren't any earthquakes to trigger avalanches while an avalanche is in progress. People need to chill out. Even the period Einstein was in was stable compared today where computers are still revolutionizing every field of science and engineering. When things are moving more slowly there is more time for reflecting on the current state of different fields, right now there is no space for that sort of thing precisely because every field is changing so much.

Given that the majority of Ars' readership will probably disagree I'll play Devil's Advocate.

Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Einstein.

They all have one thing in common. It's no so much that they were geniuses (there are plenty of them) but that they described our universe in a new way. They created a new paradigm with which to view ourselves and our place in the universe.

IF the standard model works out to be a reasonably accurate "model of everything" there may not be an opportunity for another such mind shift. Quantum mechanics is already too far out of our every day understanding of things to grasp (we just can't Grok it) so even a brilliant solution to a GUT or quantum gravity may not be enough to stand in the above company.

The mystery of Dark Matter and Dark Energy possibly leaves one remaining opportunity. If there is a complete rethink of matter and the universe required to reconcile the Standard Model and these concepts then there may yet be room.

This is rather silly - when we are still trying to figure out such small things like how our brains function and the origin of the universe it seems very short sighted to declare the age of paradigm changing geniuses to be done and gone.

Someone will find a little puzzle that intrigues them and will pull at it until we have a new understanding of our universe.

Perhaps Simonton is just a bit dismayed at the apparent lack of his own genius ;-)

Depends on the definition. A genius is rare recognized at the time. We will have to wait to see who today will be the next we push upon the label genius. Looking at Einstein, his work was also iterative or incremental for the most part. His work at a unified theory was not so much celebrated but it was looking at things in a different manner and far less iterative than what he is celebrated for.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the "multidisciplinary" definition of genius (erudites or whatever you like to call them) like Da Vinci or Newton is actually lost in the past. Nowadays almost everybody specializes in a particular branch of the knowledge.

These statements were made by people who should have known what they were talking about, but obviously didn't.

There are almost 6 times as many people on the planet today as there were when Einstein was born so it's not unreasonable to suggest that there are also somewhere near 6 times as many geniuses being born as well. I believe true genius will always find a way to make itself known.

Given that the majority of Ars' readership will probably disagree I'll play Devil's Advocate.

Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Einstein.

They all have one thing in common. It's no so much that they were geniuses (there are plenty of them) but that they described our universe in a new way. They created a new paradigm with which to view ourselves and our place in the universe.

IF the standard model works out to be a reasonably accurate "model of everything" there may not be an opportunity for another such mind shift. Quantum mechanics is already too far out of our every day understanding of things to grasp (we just can't Grok it) so even a brilliant solution to a GUT or quantum gravity may not be enough to stand in the above company.

The mystery of Dark Matter and Dark Energy possibly leaves one remaining opportunity. If there is a complete rethink of matter and the universe required to reconcile the Standard Model and these concepts then there may yet be room.

While I appreciate your effort to play the side of contrarian, reading your post screams in my ear “What lies beyond the Universe?”

Also, difficulty in groking the underlying mechanisms does not mean it does not matter to every day happenings in our life. There are PLENTY of people that use semi-conductor transistors every day that really have no clue about the quantum tunneling mechanics that they rely on, mechanics that fly in the face of “common sense”.

Next gen scientific geniuses will be able to split atoms...with their minds!

What happens when we start wiring our brains directly up to machines? I really don't envy whoever's the first person to end up with a supercomputer wired into their skull, but whatever happens should be spectacular.

Next gen scientific geniuses will be able to split atoms...with their minds!

What happens when we start wiring our brains directly up to machines? I really don’t envy whoever’s the first person to end up with a supercomputer wired into their skull, but whatever happens should be spectacular.

That’d be better than LSD. If it looked solid, rather than some sort of quack operation, I’d sign up.

I think there's still room for Eintein-level accomplishments. The best example is probably an understanding of quantum mechanics' mechanisms, or its replacement with a superior theory. This is the sort of thing that a single scientist could understand with a single epiphany and argue in a single landmark paper that would gain him incredible fame even among the public. Still, I think it's not so much that we have no modern Einsteins as that they are much more common and that the problems facing science are just harder than they once were, so a modern genius just doesn't stand out like he once did.

Given that the majority of Ars' readership will probably disagree I'll play Devil's Advocate.

Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Einstein.

They all have one thing in common. It's no so much that they were geniuses (there are plenty of them) but that they described our universe in a new way. They created a new paradigm with which to view ourselves and our place in the universe.

IF the standard model works out to be a reasonably accurate "model of everything" there may not be an opportunity for another such mind shift. Quantum mechanics is already too far out of our every day understanding of things to grasp (we just can't Grok it) so even a brilliant solution to a GUT or quantum gravity may not be enough to stand in the above company.

The mystery of Dark Matter and Dark Energy possibly leaves one remaining opportunity. If there is a complete rethink of matter and the universe required to reconcile the Standard Model and these concepts then there may yet be room.

While I appreciate your effort to play the side of contrarian, reading your post screams in my ear “What lies beyond the Universe?”

Also, difficulty in groking the underlying mechanisms does not mean it does not matter to every day happenings in our life. There are PLENTY of people that use semi-conductor transistors every day that really have no clue about the quantum tunneling mechanics that they rely on, mechanics that fly in the face of “common sense”.

I guess I'd qualify my statement that the list of geniuses I gave were of the "famous" type (I should have included Darwin as he'd fit the list too). I have no doubt people as- or more brilliant than Einstein have come and gone and made contributions to fields as profound as Relativity was to physics. My comment that quantum would not generate another such genius was more an observation that the general populace cannot wrap their minds around it - with a solid nod from me as to the importance of quantum already and desire to see a GUT in my lifetime.

Unless said advance leads to teleportation or faster than light travel (I know, I know...) I don't think the person who really works out the details of quantum gravity will gain the same level of "fame" as the geniuses on my list even if their work is just as insightful as any before.

Given that the majority of Ars' readership will probably disagree I'll play Devil's Advocate.

Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Einstein.

They all have one thing in common. It's no so much that they were geniuses (there are plenty of them) but that they described our universe in a new way. They created a new paradigm with which to view ourselves and our place in the universe.

IF the standard model works out to be a reasonably accurate "model of everything" there may not be an opportunity for another such mind shift. Quantum mechanics is already too far out of our every day understanding of things to grasp (we just can't Grok it) so even a brilliant solution to a GUT or quantum gravity may not be enough to stand in the above company.

The mystery of Dark Matter and Dark Energy possibly leaves one remaining opportunity. If there is a complete rethink of matter and the universe required to reconcile the Standard Model and these concepts then there may yet be room.

While I appreciate your effort to play the side of contrarian, reading your post screams in my ear “What lies beyond the Universe?”

Also, difficulty in groking the underlying mechanisms does not mean it does not matter to every day happenings in our life. There are PLENTY of people that use semi-conductor transistors every day that really have no clue about the quantum tunneling mechanics that they rely on, mechanics that fly in the face of “common sense”.

I guess I'd qualify my statement that the list of geniuses I gave were of the "famous" type (I should have included Darwin as he'd fit the list too). I have no doubt people as- or more brilliant than Einstein have come and gone and made contributions to fields as profound as Relativity was to physics. My comment that quantum would not generate another such genius was more an observation that the general populace cannot wrap their minds around it - with a solid nod from me as to the importance of quantum already and desire to see a GUT in my lifetime.

Unless said advance leads to teleportation or faster than light travel (I know, I know...) I don’t think the person who really works out the details of quantum gravity will gain the same level of “fame” as the geniuses on my list even if their work is just as insightful as any before.

The [main] person [attributed with] laying out the base of understanding of what is beyond the Universe could easily make that list.

Note the number of years between the items on that list, btw. Anyone that was alive, even as just an infant, at the same time as Isaac Newton had been dead at least a couple generations before Albert Einstein was born. Yes, there was overlap of Plato and Aristotle (obviously since one was the mentor of the other) but then a 1500 year gap.

EDIT: And if we extend our reach beyond the Universe we could be talking [EDIT:paradox-free] time travel.

For a "scientist" I see an appalling lack of imagination, and research. Something like 95% of the universe is unexplained and there are no "phenomena worthy of their own discipline"? Maybe he's just trolling for wanna be genius's.

Simonton argues that instead of finding big new ideas, scientists currently work on the details in increasingly specialized and precise ways.

compared to:

Quote:

In 1894, Albert A. Michelson remarked that in physics there were no more fundamental discoveries to be made. Quoting Lord Kelvin, he continued, “An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.”

Leave it up to a professor in the pseudoscience of psychology to declare that something that is unquantifiable, vague, and subjective (genius) can no longer occur. It's kind of hard to disprove that!

A lot of geniuses are just the first people to take dibs on an idea that, because of the development of ideas at the time, is on the verge of being developed by others. Darwin barely beat out Wallace, and there were many inklings of the idea of evolution that preceded those two. Newton and Descartes on calculus is another. Galileo was just rediscovering stuff from ancient Alexandria, which cribbed from early societies. Genius is just the leading edge of the curve, not something distinct in itself.

Actually it was Newton and Leibniz, and yes I see your point. But I disagree. Some people take the current state of affairs and can do a lot more than a just an additive idea. We are talking about mental leaps above and beyond the ordinary. Newton not only invented calculus. He defined mathematically the world we live in, to orders of magnitude beyond anyone prior. Einstein's counter-intuitive space-time discovery is still extremely hard to grasp for the majority of people. Those are the real geniuses.

Leave it up to a professor in the pseudoscience of psychology to declare that something that is unquantifiable, vague, and subjective (genius) can no longer occur. It's kind of hard to disprove that!

A lot of geniuses are just the first people to take dibs on an idea that, because of the development of ideas at the time, is on the verge of being developed by others. Darwin barely beat out Wallace, and there were many inklings of the idea of evolution that preceded those two. Newton and Descartes on calculus is another. Galileo was just rediscovering stuff from ancient Alexandria, which cribbed from early societies. Genius is just the leading edge of the curve, not something distinct in itself.

Actually it was Newton and Leibniz, and yes I see your point. But I disagree. Some people take the current state of affairs and can do a lot more than a just an additive idea. We are talking about mental leaps above and beyond the ordinary. Newton not only invented calculus. He defined mathematically the world we live in, to orders of magnitude beyond anyone prior. Einstein's counter-intuitive space-time discovery is still extremely hard to grasp for the majority of people. Those are the real geniuses.

It only seems that way looking back in a simplified view. Look closer and you will see many contemporaries that worked much like Newton, on work like Newton. Why do we separate him out? Is it to make it easier to make sense of the world? Easier to say we understand the world we live in and how it got to be?

It's interesting how he pointed out in the end that he hopes that his hypothesis is incorrect. In some ways, it seems apparent that he's correct, especially when thinking about how specialized science is becoming now versus all of human history. However, that's kind of implying that there are no more big questions to discover. Like what Shaw said in the article, we still barely know anything about dark matter. How about a theory to unify quantum physics and classical physics? What about asking currently unfathomable things like, what if there's something else, other than (just for fun!) our own universe?

I would give anything to see that scientists are working on 1,000 years from now. Even 100 years would be cool! To quote Tesla (who paraphrased Edmund Spenser): "Spenser has conveyed the right idea when he likened civilization to the sphere of light which a lamp throws out in darkness. The brighter the lamp and the larger the sphere the greater is its dark boundary. It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations."

Someone help me out with this - why does a pseudo-scientist's opinion on science matters one whit?

It's a bit cruel to call a psychologist a pseudo-scientist. Psychology is probably a good demonstration that he's probably wrong. This is a highly descriptive field without strong disprovable predictive theories, similar to biology over 50 years ago.

From the article, I do think this psychologist is falling into a bit of a trap, though. It reminds me of an evolutionary biologists who argued that evolution must have operated differently in the early periods of life on Earth because they generated so many important species—basically arguing that the earliest species were more pluripotent than the later species.

In the period of physics just prior to 1905, it was also said that it was hard to imagine any new discoveries could be made. Electromagnetism had unified electricity and magnetism. Most of physics was thought to just be adding a few more decimal places. There were just a few odd corners to figure out, like black body radiation, the photoelectric effect, and the slight deviation of the orbit of Mercury—very esoteric things that were in all likelihood completely explainable by known principles and not very interesting at all.

Physicists tell each other stories about this time. When a physicists tells you that all that remains is adding a few more decimal places, she's probably smirking.

As the pyramid of knowledge gets both wider and taller, the effort to reach the top is increasing, and there may be more hard study during the climb, and less of the joy of discovery that fuels the struggle. It may take a different kind of personality and skill set than in the "old days". Most of us can only hope to make a small contribution.

The days of the lone eccentric genius are winding down. Todays geniuses have to do their homework and act responsibly like everyone else. Where's the fun in that?

The problem is that this guy is a psychologist, which is kind of a joke in the first place.

Really, let's face reality: the idea of such genius is a lie in the first place. There was a revolution around the turn of the century, but Darwin and Einstein built off of what came before. The single greatest "scientific genius" was probably Darwin because of the sheer power of his ideas and how they hit on something very important that others had missed, but even then other people were getting closer to it. Einstein's ideas, while quite novel, were not unanticipated; he simply was the best at a time when it was possible for such shifts to take place, and the idea of relativity was not his alone.

Really its still possible for us to have another paradigm shift, its just that it won't hit on as much stuff - relativity and quantum are well established over a pretty big range, so any anomalies will be outside of that range. I suspect that relativity is more vulnerable (obviously the standard model is vulnerable as well, seeing as we know that it is incomplete, but it won't really change as much as relativity is likely to) because of the whole dark matter and dark energy thing. Any future advancements may be important but they won't revise all of reality. We KNOW we're close to right on a lot of things.

Will figuring out protein folding be a huge advancement? Yes. But it won't be done by one person; its just too big of a problem, and too many people are already working on it.

Leave it up to a professor in the pseudoscience of psychology to declare that something that is unquantifiable, vague, and subjective (genius) can no longer occur. It's kind of hard to disprove that!

A lot of geniuses are just the first people to take dibs on an idea that, because of the development of ideas at the time, is on the verge of being developed by others. Darwin barely beat out Wallace, and there were many inklings of the idea of evolution that preceded those two. Newton and Descartes on calculus is another. Galileo was just rediscovering stuff from ancient Alexandria, which cribbed from early societies. Genius is just the leading edge of the curve, not something distinct in itself.

Actually it was Newton and Leibniz, and yes I see your point. But I disagree. Some people take the current state of affairs and can do a lot more than a just an additive idea. We are talking about mental leaps above and beyond the ordinary. Newton not only invented calculus. He defined mathematically the world we live in, to orders of magnitude beyond anyone prior. Einstein's counter-intuitive space-time discovery is still extremely hard to grasp for the majority of people. Those are the real geniuses.

It only seems that way looking back in a simplified view. Look closer and you will see many contemporaries that worked much like Newton, on work like Newton. Why do we separate him out? Is it to make it easier to make sense of the world? Easier to say we understand the world we live in and how it got to be?

We tend to single out people like Newton and Einstein because they made significant contributions in more than one area, though they often become commonly known for only one of those things.

Newton made significant contributes to optics (most famously for writing about his experiments with white light and prisms), mechanics (gravitation), and mathematics (developing a form of calculus contemporaneously with Leibniz). Newton is famous because practically everyone referenced his work. He was genius because he made novel contributions in multiple fields that each required some form of mastery.

Einstein is mostly remembered for special and general relativity, but he is famous because he published three groundbreaking papers in one year. In 1905, he provided a working theory for the photo-electric effect, he provided a theory that provided a consistent description of mechanics in which the speed of light is constant for all non-accelerating observers no matter their speed, and he mathematically proved the existence of atoms by providing an explanation of Brownian motion. Any one of these would have been a great contribution and people would have said they were quite bright, but because they are so seemingly unrelated, each usually requiring a different kind of mastery, he's considered a genius.

We tend to call people genius for being great creators, not for inventing entirely new ideas out of thin air. Any historian of science can tell you that all the groundwork was in place for the discoveries of Newton and Einstein, and it's hard to imagine that somebody wouldn't have gotten there eventually. These people got there quicker, got there multiple times, and incidentally (usually accidentally) popularized their developments because they were so valued by so many people. Their developments are inspiring, giving many people the perspective they needed to make many more contributions. Sometimes they provide a nexus that reconnects fields that had drifted apart while developing their own observations and theories.

There are plenty of folks in industry, who advance a field and thousands of other scientists are employed to follow it through. Arguing that genius doesn't exist is just plain wrong as we can take his narrow definition and go back to Aristotle and pretend that nothing in science is novel period. Why he only decided to go back 500 years is in itself questionable.

How completely absurd a claim, many sciences have now gone so far and have become so complex that it takes geniuses to further the science, I get the impression this guy doesn't think someone is a genius unless they achieve fame, if this is true then what a complete asshat. I don't think you either need to further a science or be famous to be a genius, being very bright can be a wasted talent.

He's wrong. Unless we find and decide to apply a "treatment" for Aspergers (and some people seem to think it is and should be "treatable") there will continue to be the occasional scientist who overthrows everything that's believed in a field because they didn't realise there was a box to think inside.

That field may be more specialised, but then science has been getting more specialised ever since people started looking at the world around them and asking "why?".